A former independent counsel laments the “arrogance” of special counsel Robert Mueller in stacking his legal team investigating the president with partisans in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News.
“This is about appearances,” Joseph diGenova tells Breitbart News. “For Mueller to hire all of these people who made so many contributions to Hillary Clinton was a decision of such arrogance and indifference to appearances. You just can’t have the optics of that and not have your work questioned. And [Peter] Strzok has just brought it to the fore.”
Strzok earned his dismissal from Mueller’s team after the special counsel learned of anti-Trump text messages the FBI agent sent to an alleged paramour.
Strzok allegedly played a major role in changing the language in James Comey’s report on Hillary Clinton’s server from describing her as “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless,” a significant alteration given the former phrase approximating the language in the law possibly catalyzing an indictment. Later, according to CNN, he signed the document launching the investigation into alleged interference by the Russians in the 2016 presidential election and personally questioned former Trump administration national security advisor Michael Flynn. In other words, a politically-biased investigator played leading roles in two of the most politically-charged cases in recent times.
Mueller dismissed Strzok from his investigation. But he still holds a position at the FBI.
“He didn’t get fired,” diGenova points out. “He just got demoted.”
DiGenova faults Mueller for stacking his team with other partisans when the situation called for compiling a group of professionals without the appearance of an agenda beyond the law. When diGenova served as independent counsel in the early 1990s, he notes that professionalism rather than partisanship motivated his hiring practices.
“I chose people from my old U.S. attorney’s office with whom I had a relationship and one or two people with the Department of Justice that I knew,” diGenova explains about his investigation into George H.W. Bush administration figures accused of snooping into candidate Bill Clinton’s passport records. “I was looking for professionals, people with no ax to grind, apolitical people.”
The fifteen named lawyers working for Mueller donated heavily to Democrat candidates. According to Politifact, they gave $62,043 to Democrats and $2,750 to Republicans in races for federal offices. Put another way, for every $1 the Mueller lawyers donated to Republicans, they donated almost $23 to Democrats.
“He exercised the worst type of judgement in two very sensitive cases,” di Genova tells Breitbart News of Strzok. “This guy has become an embarrassment to the bureau, but no more than James Comey and Andrew McCabe, who have done more to destroy the credibility of the bureau than J. Edgar Hoover ever did. The brazen and blatant political effort by Comey is now without question.”
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